Posted on 06/02/2013 6:30:48 AM PDT by marshmallow
(CNN) – For Southern Baptist pastor Tim Reed, it was Scripture versus the Scouts.
“God’s word explicitly says homosexuality is a choice, a sin,” said Reed, pastor of First Baptist Church of Gravel Ridge in Jacksonville, Arkansas.
So when the Boy Scouts of America voted to lift its ban on openly gay youths on May 24, Reed said the church had no choice but to cut its charter with Troop 542.
“It’s not a hate thing here,” Reed told CNN affiliate Fox 16. “It’s a moral stance we must take as a Southern Baptist church.”
Southern Baptist leaders say Reed is not alone.
Baptist churches sponsor nearly 4,000 Scout units representing more than 100,000 youths, according to the Boy Scouts of America.
That number could drop precipitously.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, will soon urge its 45,000 congregations and 16 million members to cut ties with the Scouts, according to church leaders.
The denomination will vote on nonbinding but influential resolutions during a convention June 11-12 in Houston.
“There’s a 100% chance that there will be a resolution about disaffiliation at the convention,” said Richard Land, the longtime head of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, “and a 100% chance that 99% of people will vote for it.”
“Southern Baptists are going to be leaving the Boy Scouts en masse,” Land continued.
(Excerpt) Read more at religion.blogs.cnn.com ...
>>> If you quit, you let them win.
First of all, they have already won where scouting is concerned. Scouting CANNOT survive this.
Second, by NOT quitting, current members/supporters/leaders are CONDONING the behavior... so NOT quitting is a BIGGER win for the homos.
Third, the only possible way that Scouting can survive this is if enough people abandon the organization quickly enough for the council to reverse course immediately.
God is in the process here of separating the wheat from the chaff. This was traditionally accomplished by thrashing the harvested wheat and then pitching it up into the wind so that the chaff would be blown away while seeds would remain. Make no mistake... God is testing His people.
Honor and Principle does not reside in an organization.
It resides in the individual.
The BSA won its supreme court case that recognized their right to set their own membership guidelines. And then the national leadership threw it away.
If you think a new group with heavy religious emphasis will appeal to boys, then you're kidding yourself. Those groups already exist in most church denominations.
Can the BSA be split like some of the major Christian denominations have done through the years?
Have a BSA Traditional and a BSA Prancers.
This is what Obama and the secularists want.
They want all of the foundation forming, values building organizations destroyed.
I can't agree with you here. I, honestly, do not believe that they want to destroy all of the foundation forming, values building organizations. I believe that they want to pervert all of those organizations to teach their set of values as foundational...to twist and corrupt them. I believe they want those organizations to teach good as evil and evil as good.
There is a smaller liberal “Baptist” group, I forget its name — something like Baptist Cooperative Federation — that may stick with the liberal Scouts.
Reconstituting it under the Establishment Clause is the only thing that will protect it. Might even force a test of the wildly inverted application of “religious freedom,” the practical reality of which has become state-enforced atheism.
Every Protestant church remaining true to the core faith and moral tenets of Christianity should do it and never fail to police their moral standards, brooking no progressive pushing of boundaries. Apostate denominations can remain apostate with the BSA.
Orthodox and Conservative Jews could do the same under their own specific standard and affiliate more broadly with the Protestant groups under a set of standards agreed upon and applicable to all.
That leaves Catholics, whose church advocates orthodoxy in word, but deed most often veers to the left. There are traditionalists who are orthodox in both word and deed but adherence to the specific institution appears to preclude separating oneself from that specific institution, unlike fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews.
Not sure how such an idea could be made to work, there.
The best they can do is quit and form a separate org that does follow it`s standards.
God bless the Baptists. “Come out from among them”-St. Paul
No, if you quit, you force the organization to conform to the needs of its membership.
Importantly, the BSA tried a similar stupidity before. Back in the 1970s, the organization tried to be trendy, and invited a large number of inner city “yoots” to join its ranks. They even created a universally despised version of the Boy Scout manual, which discarded the old knowledge and replaced it with “inner city scouting”, as if it was written by a “community organizer”.
This ended after the yoots were sent to Boy Scout camps, and went on vandalism and arson riots, costing the BSA millions of dollars in repairs.
The new manual was discarded, the inner city troops were disbanded, and the BSA politburo sulked off to lick its wounds. Only with president Reagan did they regain their spirit.
So what will happen this time? Not only will troops disband, and dues paying Scouts leave the organization, but a huge number of their donations are going to dry up.
For all the promises their corporate overlords gave them about funding if they would just embrace homosexuality, there is no way they will make up for this lost revenue and other supports.
I figure the turnaround time will be about 10 years, then they will quietly discard the policy, and send out the message that religiously faithful scouts are again welcome.
Just one more reason to abolish the IRS and fix the tax code. All this is intertwined.
These churches really need to come up with a new, alternative, organization, which parallels the Boy Scouts, but with the old rules about who can join.
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Maybe they should use the opportunity to persuade the queer scouts to change the error of their ways! It would be funny - if the scouts were to declare that they are accepting gays into scouting so that they can straighten them out before they become adults.
So let’s see....the gays still aren’t happy with the Boy Scouts, and now all of the Conservative organizations are leaving.
Another example of, “Try to please everyone, wind up pleasing no one.”
The camel has his nose under the tent. Next year or the year after they will allow allow gay scout masters since it would be fair for a former gay Eagle scout not to be able to continue in the organization. It is not a question of will it happen, just a question of when.
And they are?
We had a leadership meeting the other night. Our troop is sticking with it for a bit to see what happens. But, I have a letter prepared that will be sent in the next few days. In the two years of our troops existence, we have risen to be stellar performers in the annual popcorn sale. Our troop even outsold a smaller district in our council. The council receives 33% of our sales. Well, 33% of nothing is... Plus we will not participate in Friends of Scouting and we are tightening up our troop membership policy to require a letter of recommendation from the candidates church. We will not allow open homesexuals in our troop. If they want to override us, we will quit immediately. We’re fighting back.
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